The Other Family (2 page)

‘OK,’ Richie said softly. He began on some mounting chords. ‘Course you do.’

‘Richie—’

‘Wear the diamonds,’ Richie said. ‘Wear them. Let me pay for them.’

But she hadn’t. She told herself that it was principle, that a woman of independent mind could buy her own manifestations of the outward respectability required at the school gates, even in liberal-minded North London. For a week or two, she registered the glances cast at her sizeable diamonds – and the conclusions visibly drawn in consequence – with satisfaction and even tiny flashes of triumph. When Tamsin, who missed no detail of anyone’s appearance, said, ‘Oh my God, Mum, did Dad give you those?’ she had managed a small, self-conscious smile that could easily have passed for coquettish self-satisfaction. But then heart quietly overcame head with its usual stealthy persistence, and the independence and the triumph faded before the miserable and energetic longing for her status as Mrs Rossiter to be a reality rather than a fantasy adorned with meaningless – and engineered – symbols.

It wasn’t really just status either. She was Richie’s manager, after all, the controller and keeper of his diary, his finances, his pragmatically necessary well-being. She had plenty of status, in the eyes of Richie’s profession, as Christine Kelsey, the woman – girl, back then – who had persuaded Richie Rossiter that a bigger, younger audience awaited him outside the Northern circuit where he had thus far spent all his performing life. Richie only answered the telephone for pleasure and left all administration, and certainly anything technological, to her. No, it wasn’t really status, it really wasn’t.

It was instead that hoary old, urgent old, irreplaceable old need for commitment. In twenty-three years together, Chrissie could not shift Richie one millimetre towards divorcing his wife, and marrying her. He wasn’t Catholic, he wasn’t in touch with his wife, he wasn’t even much in touch
with his son by that marriage. He was living in London, in apparent contentment, with a woman he had elected to leave his wife for, and the three daughters he had had by her and with whom he was plainly besotted, but he would make no move of any kind to transfer his legal position as head of his first family to head of his second.

For years, he said he would think about it, that he came from a place and a background where traditional codes of conduct were as fundamental to a person as their heartbeat, and therefore it would take him time. And Chrissie at first understood that and, a little later in this relationship, continued at least to try and understand it. But his efforts – such as they had ever really been – dwindled to invisibility over time, corresponding inevitably with a rise in Chrissie’s anxiety and insistence. The more she asked – in a voice whose rigorously modulated control spoke volumes – the more he played his Gershwin. If she persisted, he switched to Rachmaninov, and played with his eyes closed. In the end – well, it now looked like the end – she had marched out and bought her industrial diamonds and, she now realized, surveying her left hand in the first dawn of her new widowhood, let him off the hook, by finding – as she so often did, good old Chrissie – a practical solution to living with his refusal.

She let her hand fall into the plumpness of the duvet. The girls were all Rossiter. Tamsin Rossiter, Delia Rossiter, Amy Rossiter. That was how they had all been registered at birth, with her agreement, encouragement even.

‘It makes sense to have your name,’ she’d said. ‘After all, you’re the well-known one. You’re the one people will associate them with.’

She’d waited three times for him to say, ‘Well, they’re our children, pet, so I think you should join the Rossiter clan as well, don’t you?’ but he never did.

He accepted the girls as if it was entirely natural that they should be identified with him, and his pride and delight in them couldn’t be faulted. Those friends from the North who had managed to accept Richie’s transition to London and to Chrissie professed exaggerated amazement at his preparedness to share the chores of three babies in the space of five years: he was a traitor, they said loudly, glass in hand, jocular arm round Chrissie’s shoulders, to the noble cause of unreconstructed Northern manhood. But none of them, however they might covertly stare at Chrissie’s legs and breasts or overtly admire her cooking or her ability to get Richie gigs in legendarily impossible venues, ever urged him to marry her. Perhaps, Chrissie thought now, staring at the ceiling through which she hoped Dilly still slept, they thought he had.

After all, the girls did. Or, to put it another way, the girls had no reason to believe that he hadn’t. They were all Rossiters, Chrissie signed herself Rossiter on all family-concerned occasions, and they knew her professional name was Kelsey just as they knew she was their father’s manager. It wouldn’t have occurred to them that their parents weren’t married because the subject had simply never arisen. The disputes that arose between Richie and Chrissie were – it was the stuff of their family chronicle – because their father wanted to work less and play and sing more just for playing and singing’s sake, and their mother, an acknowledged businesswoman, wanted to keep up the momentum. The girls, Chrissie knew, were inclined to side with their father. That was no surprise – he had traded, for decades, on getting women audiences to side with him. But – perhaps because of this, at least in part – the girls had found it hard to leave home. Tamsin had tried, and had come back again, and when she came home it was to her father that she had instinctively turned and it was her father who had made it plain that she was more than welcome.

Chrissie swallowed. She pictured Dilly through that ceiling, asleep in her severe cotton pyjamas in the resolute order of her bedroom. Thank heavens, today, that she was there. And thank heavens for Amy, in her equally determined chaos in the next room, and for Tamsin amid the ribbons and flowers and china-shoe collections down the landing. Thank heavens she hadn’t prevailed, and achieved her aim of even attempted daughterly self-sufficiency before the girls reached the age of twenty. Richie had been right. He was wrong about a lot of things, but about his girls he had been right.

Chrissie began to cry again. She pulled her hand back in, under the duvet, and rolled on her side, where Richie’s pillow awaited her in all its glorious, intimate, agonizing familiarity.

‘Where’s Mum?’ Tamsin said.

She was standing in the kitchen doorway clutching a pink cotton kimono round her as if her stomach hurt. Dilly was sitting at the table, staring out of the window in front of her, and the tabletop was littered with screwed-up balls of tissue. Amy was down the far end of the kitchen by the sink, standing on one leg, her raised foot in her hand, apparently gazing out into the garden. Neither moved.

‘Where’s Mum?’ Tamsin said again.

‘Dunno,’ Dilly said.

Amy said, without turning, ‘Did you look in her room?’

‘Door’s shut.’

Amy let her foot go.

‘Well then.’

Tamsin padded down the kitchen in her pink slippers.

‘I couldn’t sleep.’

‘Nor me.’

She picked up the kettle and nudged Amy sideways so that she could fill it at the sink.

‘I don’t believe it’s happened.’

‘Nor me.’

‘I can’t—’

Cold water gushed into the kettle, bounced out and caught Amy’s sleeve.

‘Stupid cow!’

Tamsin took no notice. She carried the kettle back to its mooring.

‘What are we gonna do?’ Dilly said.

Tamsin switched the kettle on.

‘Go back to the hospital. All the formalities—’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s what they said. Last night. They said it’s too late now, but come back in the morning.’

‘It’s the morning now,’ Amy said, still gazing into the garden.

Dilly half turned from the table.

‘Will Mum know what to do?’

Tamsin took one mug out of a cupboard.

‘Why should she?’

‘Can I have some tea?’ Amy said.

‘What d’you mean, why should she?’

‘Why should she,’ Tamsin said, her voice breaking, ‘know what you do when your husband dies?’

Amy cried out, ‘Don’t say that!’

Tamsin got out a second mug. Then, after a pause, a third.

She said, not looking at Amy, ‘It’s true, babe.’

‘I don’t want it to be!’

‘None of us do,’ Dilly said. She gathered all the tissue balls up in her hands and crushed them together. Then she stood up and crossed the kitchen and dumped them in the pedal bin. ‘Is not being able to take it in worse than when you’ve taken it in?’

‘It’s all awful,’ Amy said.

‘Will Mum—’ Dilly said, and stopped.

Tamsin was taking tea bags out of a caddy their father had brought down from Newcastle, a battered tin caddy with a crude portrait of Earl Grey stamped on all four sides. The caddy had always been an object of mild family derision, being so cosy, so evidently much used, so sturdily unsleek. Richie had loved it. He said it was like one he had grown up with, in the terraced house of his childhood in North Shields. He said it was honest, and he liked it filled with Yorkshire tea bags. Earl Grey tea – no disrespect to His Lordship – was for toffs and for women.

Tamsin’s hand shook now, opening it.

‘Will Mum what?’

‘Well,’ Dilly said. ‘Well,
manage
.’

Tamsin closed the caddy and shut it quickly away in its cupboard.

‘She’s very practical. She’ll manage.’

‘But there’s the other stuff—’

Amy turned from the sink.

‘Dad won’t be singing.’

‘No.’

‘If Dad isn’t singing—’

Tamsin poured boiling water into the mugs in a wavering stream.

‘Maybe she can manage other people—’

‘Who can?’ Chrissie asked from the doorway.

She was wearing Richie’s navy-blue bathrobe and she had pulled her hair back into a tight ponytail. Dilly got up from the table to hug her and Amy came running down the kitchen to join in.

‘We were just wondering,’ Tamsin said unsteadily.

Chrissie said into Dilly’s shoulder, ‘Me too.’ She looked at Amy. ‘Did anyone sleep?’

‘Not really.’

‘She played her flute,’ Dilly said between clenched teeth. ‘She played and played her flute. I couldn’t have slept even if I’d wanted to.’

‘I didn’t want to,’ Tamsin said, ‘because of having to wake up again.’

Chrissie said, ‘Is that tea?’

‘I’ll make another one—’

Chrissie moved towards the table, still holding her daughters. They felt to her, at that moment, like her only support and sympathy yet at the same time like a burden of redoubled emotional intensity that she knew neither how to manage nor to put down. She subsided into a chair, and Tamsin put a mug of tea in front of her. She glanced up.

‘Thank you. Toast?’

‘Couldn’t,’ Dilly said.

‘Could you try? Just a slice? It would help, it really would.’

Dilly shook her head. Amy opened the larder cupboard and rummaged about in it for a while. Then she took out a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits and put them on the table.

‘I’m trying,’ Dilly said tensely, ‘not to eat chocolate.’

‘You’re a pain—’

‘Shh,’ Chrissie said. She took Dilly’s nearest wrist. ‘Shh. Shh.’

Dilly took her hand away and held it over her eyes.

‘Dad ate those—’

‘No, he didn’t,’ Amy said. ‘No, he didn’t. He ate those putrid ones with chocolate-cream stuff in, he—’

‘Please,’ Chrissie said. She picked up her mug. ‘What were you saying when I came in?’

Tamsin put the remaining mugs on the table. She looked at her sisters. They were looking at the table.

She said, ‘We were talking about you.’

Chrissie raised her head. ‘And?’ she said.

Tamsin sat down, pulling her kimono round her as if in the teeth of a gale.

Dilly took her hand away from her face. She said, ‘It’s just, well, will you – will we – be OK, will we manage, will we—’

There was a pause.

‘I don’t think,’ Chrissie said, ‘that we’ll be OK for quite a long time. Do you? I don’t think we can expect to be. There’s so much to get used to that we don’t really want – to get used to. Isn’t there?’ She stopped. She looked round the table. Amy had broken a biscuit into several pieces and was jigsawing them back together again. Chrissie said, ‘But you know all that, don’t you? You know all that as well as I do. You didn’t mean that, did you, you didn’t mean how are we going to manage emotionally, did you?’

‘It seems,’ Tamsin said, ‘so rubbish to even think of anything else—’

‘No,’ Chrissie said, ‘it’s practical. We have to be practical. We have to live. We have to go on living. That’s what Dad wanted. That’s what Dad worked for.’

Amy began to cry quietly onto her broken biscuit.

Chrissie retrieved Dilly’s hand and took Amy’s nearest one. She said, looking at Tamsin, gripping the others, ‘We’ll be fine. Don’t worry. We have the house. And there’s more. And I’ll go on working. You aren’t to worry. Anyway, it isn’t today’s problem. Today just has to be got through, however we can manage it.’

Tamsin was moving her tea mug round in little circles with her right hand and pressing her left into her stomach. She said, ‘We ought to tell people.’

‘Yes,’ Chrissie said, ‘we should. We must make a list.’

Tamsin looked up.

‘I might be moving in with Robbie.’

Dilly gave a small scream.

‘Not now, darling,’ Chrissie said tiredly.

‘But I—’

‘Shut it!’ Amy said suddenly.

Tamsin shrugged.

‘I just thought if we were making plans, making lists—’

Amy leaned across the table. She hissed, ‘We were going to make a list of who to tell that Dad died last night. Not lists of who we were planning to shack up with.’

Chrissie got up from the table.

‘And the registrar,’ she said. She began to shuffle through the pile of papers by the telephone. ‘And the undertaker. And I suppose the newspapers. Always better to tell them than have them guess.’

Tamsin sat up straighter. She said, ‘What about Margaret?’

Chrissie stopped shuffling.

‘Who?’

‘Margaret,’ Tamsin said.

Amy and Dilly looked at her.